I find it rather shocking that the Editorial Board of the Alligator so casually brushed off the actions of ACORN - the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - in their Thursday column and were so quick to vilify the filmmakers who brought the situation to light. The Editorial Board described ACORN's actions as "explaining how to run a brothel of underage 'women of the night' while evading the federal government."
The board should have been more explicit in their video descriptions. In the Baltimore office, the journalists claimed the girls were mostly 14 years old and from El Salvador. The ACORN employees then proceeded to explain how they could claim up to three of the girls as dependents and receive child tax credit.
What's more is that the Editorial Board claimed the "gotcha" journalists went to San Diego and were unsucessful in their attempts. To the contrary. After airing videos from D.C., Brooklyn, and San Bernardino, a newly aired video from the San Diego ACORN office shows an ACORN employee who is actually a Mexican trained attorney advising the duo on how to traffic El Salvadorian prostitutes aged 13 to 15 to the United States through Tijuana because "he has contacts there."
By labeling these videos as "gotcha journalism," the Editorial Board did a disservice to the community and to the paper's credibility by brushing off the gravity and severity of the situation these videos bring to light.
The fact that there are five videos being aired now, and probably more waiting to be released, is only more evidence that this is no isolated incident. This type of corruption clearly goes beyond what the board described as the actions of a "handful of employees" and is seemingly woven into the fabric of the ACORN organization on a countrywide scale. Freezing funds is just the beginning, and the government should go beyond a mere investigation of the offices in question as the board advised on Thursday. They should investigate the entire organization nationwide.
